It has been more than 12 years since this plant in Central Michigan has sent anything to a dump. The 733,000-square-foot Flint Engine facility was G.M.’s first to achieve what is known as zero-waste to landfill — a designation now held by more than 150 of its factories and office buildings worldwide.
Not only is G.M. trying to avoid sending waste to landfills, it’s trying to intercept other would-be garbage.
John Bradburn, G.M.’s global waste reduction manager, showed off air filters and noise-damping insulation for the Chevrolet Equinox engine that had been made from some of the millions of plastic water bottles from the Flint water contamination crisis. The company also converted 227 miles of oil-absorbing boom used in the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon explosion in 2010 into air deflectors for the engines of the Chevrolet Volt.
“What’s great is when you can utilize those materials, upcycle them, either in a facility-related product or even a vehicle part,” said Mr. Bradburn. G.M. realizes $1 billion in revenue each year from the sale of recyclable materials, he said.
G.M. is not the only automaker for which environmental considerations extend beyond what their cars release into the air to what they put into the ground. Ford has 82 zero-waste facilities worldwide, including the century-old Rouge Center complex in Dearborn, Mich., which includes six factories and a steel foundry.
Toyota, which has 27 zero-waste facilities in North America, said it reused or recycled 96 percent of its unregulated waste. Fiat Chrysler, Honda, Subaru and others also boast of their waste-reduction efforts to shareholders, customers and the general public.
“The auto industry has definitely been in the lead, paving the way for zero waste for heavy manufacturing,” said Gary Liss, the first president of the U.S. Zero Waste Business Council and a board member of the Zero Waste International Alliance.
Part of the reason is, of course, economic. In the 1990s, automakers manufacturing parts and assembling vehicles in Europe and Asia faced new regulations and increasing costs as landfill space became scarce. By the early 2000s, auto companies operating in the North America, where sending waste to landfills has long been cheap because space is plentiful, realized that reducing waste through recycling and reuse yields considerable cost savings as well as positive public relations, said Andy Hobbs, Ford’s director of environmental quality.
“This is not just good environmentally and good for our communities, it’s also great for shareholders because we pay less to dispose of waste, we reduce our liabilities going forward and we’re not putting stuff in a hole in the ground,” said Mr. Hobbs, who said Ford now sends 8.6 pounds of waste per vehicle to landfills worldwide, compared to about 85 pounds in 2007. Less waste and less expensive means of disposal help keep costs down. “That enables our marketing team and dealers to lower the price of the car,” he said.
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